If you haven’t heard of this “group shopping experience” yet you’re probably missing out on some sweet deals. On Monday, September 27th, Weforia.com made its Boston debut. What’s Weforia – a collective buying site vying for some of your money by offering steep discounts for services in your general area.
Directly from the newly launched Weforia home page, here’s what they say: “Get hooked up with exclusive deals in your area – enter your email address to get on the VIP list. Weforia brings you awesome deals for fun and interesting things to do and places to go in your area. Explore all the great local businesses your city has to offer, at a very special price. Weforia takes the powerful influence a group of interested buyers has and combines it together with our large, diverse group of merchants and voilà, great deals are born!”
Here’s how it works. You signup and enter your email address to receive a daily email describing the deal of the day. If you want to take advantage of the specially priced deal you click to buy it right away. That’s the first step. Now you have to wait to see if the deal meets its “tipping point”. The tipping point is the number of people the merchant has decided it requires to take advantage of the deal before it finalizes the offer. If the merchant says they need 20 takers and only get 19 – the deal goes away and no one gets it. Obviously, if the deal disappears, you do not get charged and simply have to wait for the next offer to come via email.
Weforia.com is just the latest entry into this type of sales and marketing. Pam has used Groupon.com for a while now and tells me there are plenty of good deals coming through. For the most part, the offers are for personal service s like dry cleaning, Day Spas, Hair Salons, Hyline Cruises, Theatre tickets and other entertainment values as well as many restaurants in the area. Most of the offers come in at about 50% off the regular price. Not a bad savings if the particular offer tickles your fancy.
Here are some links to just a few of these collective buying sites and with their current popularity, I’m sure there will be many more to come.
Groupon: http://www.groupon.com/boston
Weforia: http://www.weforia.com
Living Social: http://livingsocial.com
Buy With Me: http://buywithme.com
